arXiv subjects

Guan Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Guan Huang.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Pre-trained Language Model for Web-scale Retrieval in Baidu Search

Retrieval is a crucial stage in web search that identifies a small set of query-relevant candidates from a billion-scale corpus. Discovering more semantically-related candidates in the retrieval stage is very promising to expose more high-quality results to the end users. However, it still remains non-trivial challenges of building and deploying effective retrieval models for semantic matching in real search engine. In this paper, we describe the retrieval system that we developed and deployed in Baidu Search. The system exploits the recent state-of-the-art Chinese pretrained language model, namely Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration (ERNIE), which facilitates the system with expressive semantic matching. In particular, we developed an ERNIE-based retrieval model, which is equipped with 1) expressive Transformer-based semantic encoders, and 2) a comprehensive multi-stage training paradigm. More importantly, we present a practical system workflow for deploying the model in web-scale retrieval. Eventually, the system is fully deployed into production, where rigorous offline and online experiments were conducted. The results show that the system can perform high-quality candidate retrieval, especially for those tail queries with uncommon demands. Overall, the new retrieval system facilitated by pretrained language model (i.e., ERNIE) can largely improve the usability and applicability of our search engine.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

Face-NMS: A Core-set Selection Approach for Efficient Face Recognition

Recently, face recognition in the wild has achieved remarkable success and one key engine is the increasing size of training data. For example, the largest face dataset, WebFace42M contains about 2 million identities and 42 million faces. However, a massive number of faces raise the constraints in training time, computing resources, and memory cost. The current research on this problem mainly focuses on designing an efficient Fully-connected layer (FC) to reduce GPU memory consumption caused by a large number of identities. In this work, we relax these constraints by resolving the redundancy problem of the up-to-date face datasets caused by the greedily collecting operation (i.e. the core-set selection perspective). As the first attempt in this perspective on the face recognition problem, we find that existing methods are limited in both performance and efficiency. For superior cost-efficiency, we contribute a novel filtering strategy dubbed Face-NMS. Face-NMS works on feature space and simultaneously considers the local and global sparsity in generating core sets. In practice, Face-NMS is analogous to Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) in the object detection community. It ranks the faces by their potential contribution to the overall sparsity and filters out the superfluous face in the pairs with high similarity for local sparsity. With respect to the efficiency aspect, Face-NMS accelerates the whole pipeline by applying a smaller but sufficient proxy dataset in training the proxy model. As a result, with Face-NMS, we successfully scale down the WebFace42M dataset to 60% while retaining its performance on the main benchmarks, offering a 40% resource-saving and 1.64 times acceleration. The code is publicly available for reference at https://github.com/HuangJunJie2017/Face-NMS.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Masked Face Recognition Challenge: The WebFace260M Track Report

According to WHO statistics, there are more than 204,617,027 confirmed COVID-19 cases including 4,323,247 deaths worldwide till August 12, 2021. During the coronavirus epidemic, almost everyone wears a facial mask. Traditionally, face recognition approaches process mostly non-occluded faces, which include primary facial features such as the eyes, nose, and mouth. Removing the mask for authentication in airports or laboratories will increase the risk of virus infection, posing a huge challenge to current face recognition systems. Due to the sudden outbreak of the epidemic, there are yet no publicly available real-world masked face recognition (MFR) benchmark. To cope with the above-mentioned issue, we organize the Face Bio-metrics under COVID Workshop and Masked Face Recognition Challenge in ICCV 2021. Enabled by the ultra-large-scale WebFace260M benchmark and the Face Recognition Under Inference Time conStraint (FRUITS) protocol, this challenge (WebFace260M Track) aims to push the frontiers of practical MFR. Since public evaluation sets are mostly saturated or contain noise, a new test set is gathered consisting of elaborated 2,478 celebrities and 60,926 faces. Meanwhile, we collect the world-largest real-world masked test set. In the first phase of WebFace260M Track, 69 teams (total 833 solutions) participate in the challenge and 49 teams exceed the performance of our baseline. There are second phase of the challenge till October 1, 2021 and on-going leaderboard. We will actively update this report in the future.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

SIMPLE: SIngle-network with Mimicking and Point Learning for Bottom-up Human Pose Estimation

The practical application requests both accuracy and efficiency on multi-person pose estimation algorithms. But the high accuracy and fast inference speed are dominated by top-down methods and bottom-up methods respectively. To make a better trade-off between accuracy and efficiency, we propose a novel multi-person pose estimation framework, SIngle-network with Mimicking and Point Learning for Bottom-up Human Pose Estimation (SIMPLE). Specifically, in the training process, we enable SIMPLE to mimic the pose knowledge from the high-performance top-down pipeline, which significantly promotes SIMPLE's accuracy while maintaining its high efficiency during inference. Besides, SIMPLE formulates human detection and pose estimation as a unified point learning framework to complement each other in single-network. This is quite different from previous works where the two tasks may interfere with each other. To the best of our knowledge, both mimicking strategy between different method types and unified point learning are firstly proposed in pose estimation. In experiments, our approach achieves the new state-of-the-art performance among bottom-up methods on the COCO, MPII and PoseTrack datasets. Compared with the top-down approaches, SIMPLE has comparable accuracy and faster inference speed.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Structure-Aware Face Clustering on a Large-Scale Graph with $\bf{10^{7}}$ Nodes

Face clustering is a promising method for annotating unlabeled face images. Recent supervised approaches have boosted the face clustering accuracy greatly, however their performance is still far from satisfactory. These methods can be roughly divided into global-based and local-based ones. Global-based methods suffer from the limitation of training data scale, while local-based ones are difficult to grasp the whole graph structure information and usually take a long time for inference. Previous approaches fail to tackle these two challenges simultaneously. To address the dilemma of large-scale training and efficient inference, we propose the STructure-AwaRe Face Clustering (STAR-FC) method. Specifically, we design a structure-preserved subgraph sampling strategy to explore the power of large-scale training data, which can increase the training data scale from ${10^{5}}$ to ${10^{7}}$. During inference, the STAR-FC performs efficient full-graph clustering with two steps: graph parsing and graph refinement. And the concept of node intimacy is introduced in the second step to mine the local structural information. The STAR-FC gets 91.97 pairwise F-score on partial MS1M within 310s which surpasses the state-of-the-arts. Furthermore, we are the first to train on very large-scale graph with 20M nodes, and achieve superior inference results on 12M testing data. Overall, as a simple and effective method, the proposed STAR-FC provides a strong baseline for large-scale face clustering. Code is available at \url{https://sstzal.github.io/STAR-FC/}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

WebFace260M: A Benchmark Unveiling the Power of Million-Scale Deep Face Recognition

In this paper, we contribute a new million-scale face benchmark containing noisy 4M identities/260M faces (WebFace260M) and cleaned 2M identities/42M faces (WebFace42M) training data, as well as an elaborately designed time-constrained evaluation protocol. Firstly, we collect 4M name list and download 260M faces from the Internet. Then, a Cleaning Automatically utilizing Self-Training (CAST) pipeline is devised to purify the tremendous WebFace260M, which is efficient and scalable. To the best of our knowledge, the cleaned WebFace42M is the largest public face recognition training set and we expect to close the data gap between academia and industry. Referring to practical scenarios, Face Recognition Under Inference Time conStraint (FRUITS) protocol and a test set are constructed to comprehensively evaluate face matchers. Equipped with this benchmark, we delve into million-scale face recognition problems. A distributed framework is developed to train face recognition models efficiently without tampering with the performance. Empowered by WebFace42M, we reduce relative 40% failure rate on the challenging IJB-C set, and ranks the 3rd among 430 entries on NIST-FRVT. Even 10% data (WebFace4M) shows superior performance compared with public training set. Furthermore, comprehensive baselines are established on our rich-attribute test set under FRUITS-100ms/500ms/1000ms protocol, including MobileNet, EfficientNet, AttentionNet, ResNet, SENet, ResNeXt and RegNet families. Benchmark website is https://www.face-benchmark.org.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

The Devil is in the Details: Delving into Unbiased Data Processing for Human Pose Estimation

Being a fundamental component in training and inference, data processing has not been systematically considered in human pose estimation community, to the best of our knowledge. In this paper, we focus on this problem and find that the devil of human pose estimation evolution is in the biased data processing. Specifically, by investigating the standard data processing in state-of-the-art approaches mainly including coordinate system transformation and keypoint format transformation (i.e., encoding and decoding), we find that the results obtained by common flipping strategy are unaligned with the original ones in inference. Moreover, there is a statistical error in some keypoint format transformation methods. Two problems couple together, significantly degrade the pose estimation performance and thus lay a trap for the research community. This trap has given bone to many suboptimal remedies, which are always unreported, confusing but influential. By causing failure in reproduction and unfair in comparison, the unreported remedies seriously impedes the technological development. To tackle this dilemma from the source, we propose Unbiased Data Processing (UDP) consist of two technique aspect for the two aforementioned problems respectively (i.e., unbiased coordinate system transformation and unbiased keypoint format transformation). As a model-agnostic approach and a superior solution, UDP successfully pushes the performance boundary of human pose estimation and offers a higher and more reliable baseline for research community. Code is public available in https://github.com/HuangJunJie2017/UDP-Pose

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

AID: Pushing the Performance Boundary of Human Pose Estimation with Information Dropping Augmentation

Both appearance cue and constraint cue are vital for human pose estimation. However, there is a tendency in most existing works to overfitting the former and overlook the latter. In this paper, we propose Augmentation by Information Dropping (AID) to verify and tackle this dilemma. Alone with AID as a prerequisite for effectively exploiting its potential, we propose customized training schedules, which are designed by analyzing the pattern of loss and performance in training process from the perspective of information supplying. In experiments, as a model-agnostic approach, AID promotes various state-of-the-art methods in both bottom-up and top-down paradigms with different input sizes, frameworks, backbones, training and testing sets. On popular COCO human pose estimation test set, AID consistently boosts the performance of different configurations by around 0.6 AP in top-down paradigm and up to 1.5 AP in bottom-up paradigm. On more challenging CrowdPose dataset, the improvement is more than 1.5 AP. As AID successfully pushes the performance boundary of human pose estimation problem by considerable margin and sets a new state-of-the-art, we hope AID to be a regular configuration for training human pose estimators. The source code will be publicly available for further research.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

On The Energy Transfer To High Frequencies In The Damped/Driven Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation (Extended Version)

We consider a damped/driven nonlinear Schrödinger equation in an $n$-cube $K^{n}\subset\mathbb{R}^n$, $n$ is arbitrary, under Dirichlet boundary conditions \[ u_t-νΔu+i|u|^2u=\sqrtνη(t,x),\quad x\in K^{n},\quad u|_{\partial K^{n}}=0, \quad ν>0, \] where $η(t,x)$ is a random force that is white in time and smooth in space. It is known that the Sobolev norms of solutions satisfy $ \| u(t)\|_m^2 \le Cν^{-m}, $ uniformly in $t\ge0$ and $ν>0$. In this work we prove that for small $ν>0$ and any initial data, with large probability the Sobolev norms $\|u(t,\cdot)\|_m$ of the solutions with $m>2$ become large at least to the order of $ν^{-κ_{n,m}}$ with $κ_{n,m}>0$, on time intervals of order $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}ν)$.

math.AP↗

arXiv2020

Instance Scale Normalization for image understanding

Scale variation remains a challenging problem for object detection. Common paradigms usually adopt multiscale training & testing (image pyramid) or FPN (feature pyramid network) to process objects in a wide scale range. However, multi-scale methods aggravate more variations of scale that even deep convolution neural networks with FPN cannot handle well. In this work, we propose an innovative paradigm called Instance Scale Normalization (ISN) to resolve the above problem. ISN compresses the scale space of objects into a consistent range (ISN range), in both training and testing phases. This reassures the problem of scale variation fundamentally and reduces the difficulty of network optimization. Experiments show that ISN surpasses multi-scale counterpart significantly for object detection, instance segmentation, and multi-task human pose estimation, on several architectures. On COCO test-dev, our single model based on ISN achieves 46.5 mAP with a ResNet-101 backbone, which is among the state-of-the-art (SOTA) candidates for object detection.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Multi-Stage HRNet: Multiple Stage High-Resolution Network for Human Pose Estimation

Human pose estimation are of importance for visual understanding tasks such as action recognition and human-computer interaction. In this work, we present a Multiple Stage High-Resolution Network (Multi-Stage HRNet) to tackling the problem of multi-person pose estimation in images. Specifically, we follow the top-down pipelines and high-resolution representations are maintained during single-person pose estimation. In addition, multiple stage network and cross stage feature aggregation are adopted to further refine the keypoint position. The resulting approach achieves promising results in COCO datasets. Our single-model-single-scale test configuration obtains 77.1 AP score in test-dev using publicly available training data.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

High Performance Visual Object Tracking with Unified Convolutional Networks

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) based tracking approaches have shown favorable performance in recent benchmarks. Nonetheless, the chosen CNN features are always pre-trained in different tasks and individual components in tracking systems are learned separately, thus the achieved tracking performance may be suboptimal. Besides, most of these trackers are not designed towards real-time applications because of their time-consuming feature extraction and complex optimization details. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework to learn the convolutional features and perform the tracking process simultaneously, namely, a unified convolutional tracker (UCT). Specifically, the UCT treats feature extractor and tracking process both as convolution operation and trains them jointly, which enables learned CNN features are tightly coupled with tracking process. During online tracking, an efficient model updating method is proposed by introducing peak-versus-noise ratio (PNR) criterion, and scale changes are handled efficiently by incorporating a scale branch into network. Experiments are performed on four challenging tracking datasets: OTB2013, OTB2015, VOT2015 and VOT2016. Our method achieves leading performance on these benchmarks while maintaining beyond real-time speed.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2019

FastPose: Towards Real-time Pose Estimation and Tracking via Scale-normalized Multi-task Networks

Both accuracy and efficiency are significant for pose estimation and tracking in videos. State-of-the-art performance is dominated by two-stages top-down methods. Despite the leading results, these methods are impractical for real-world applications due to their separated architectures and complicated calculation. This paper addresses the task of articulated multi-person pose estimation and tracking towards real-time speed. An end-to-end multi-task network (MTN) is designed to perform human detection, pose estimation, and person re-identification (Re-ID) tasks simultaneously. To alleviate the performance bottleneck caused by scale variation problem, a paradigm which exploits scale-normalized image and feature pyramids (SIFP) is proposed to boost both performance and speed. Given the results of MTN, we adopt an occlusion-aware Re-ID feature strategy in the pose tracking module, where pose information is utilized to infer the occlusion state to make better use of Re-ID feature. In experiments, we demonstrate that the pose estimation and tracking performance improves steadily utilizing SIFP through different backbones. Using ResNet-18 and ResNet-50 as backbones, the overall pose tracking framework achieves competitive performance with 29.4 FPS and 12.2 FPS, respectively. Additionally, occlusion-aware Re-ID feature decreases the identification switches by 37% in the pose tracking process.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Exploiting Offset-guided Network for Pose Estimation and Tracking

Human pose estimation has witnessed a significant advance thanks to the development of deep learning. Recent human pose estimation approaches tend to directly predict the location heatmaps, which causes quantization errors and inevitably deteriorates the performance within the reduced network output. Aim at solving it, we revisit the heatmap-offset aggregation method and propose the Offset-guided Network (OGN) with an intuitive but effective fusion strategy for both two-stages pose estimation and Mask R-CNN. For two-stages pose estimation, a greedy box generation strategy is also proposed to keep more necessary candidates while performing person detection. For mask R-CNN, ratio-consistent is adopted to improve the generalization ability of the network. State-of-the-art results on COCO and PoseTrack dataset verify the effectiveness of our offset-guided pose estimation and tracking.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

State-aware Re-identification Feature for Multi-target Multi-camera Tracking

Multi-target Multi-camera Tracking (MTMCT) aims to extract the trajectories from videos captured by a set of cameras. Recently, the tracking performance of MTMCT is significantly enhanced with the employment of re-identification (Re-ID) model. However, the appearance feature usually becomes unreliable due to the occlusion and orientation variance of the targets. Directly applying Re-ID model in MTMCT will encounter the problem of identity switches (IDS) and tracklet fragment caused by occlusion. To solve these problems, we propose a novel tracking framework in this paper. In this framework, the occlusion status and orientation information are utilized in Re-ID model with human pose information considered. In addition, the tracklet association using the proposed fused tracking feature is adopted to handle the fragment problem. The proposed tracker achieves 81.3\% IDF1 on the multiple-camera hard sequence, which outperforms all other reference methods by a large margin.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Attention-guided Unified Network for Panoptic Segmentation

This paper studies panoptic segmentation, a recently proposed task which segments foreground (FG) objects at the instance level as well as background (BG) contents at the semantic level. Existing methods mostly dealt with these two problems separately, but in this paper, we reveal the underlying relationship between them, in particular, FG objects provide complementary cues to assist BG understanding. Our approach, named the Attention-guided Unified Network (AUNet), is a unified framework with two branches for FG and BG segmentation simultaneously. Two sources of attentions are added to the BG branch, namely, RPN and FG segmentation mask to provide object-level and pixel-level attentions, respectively. Our approach is generalized to different backbones with consistent accuracy gain in both FG and BG segmentation, and also sets new state-of-the-arts both in the MS-COCO (46.5% PQ) and Cityscapes (59.0% PQ) benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

EANet: Enhancing Alignment for Cross-Domain Person Re-identification

Person re-identification (ReID) has achieved significant improvement under the single-domain setting. However, directly exploiting a model to new domains is always faced with huge performance drop, and adapting the model to new domains without target-domain identity labels is still challenging. In this paper, we address cross-domain ReID and make contributions for both model generalization and adaptation. First, we propose Part Aligned Pooling (PAP) that brings significant improvement for cross-domain testing. Second, we design a Part Segmentation (PS) constraint over ReID feature to enhance alignment and improve model generalization. Finally, we show that applying our PS constraint to unlabeled target domain images serves as effective domain adaptation. We conduct extensive experiments between three large datasets, Market1501, CUHK03 and DukeMTMC-reID. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance under both source-domain and cross-domain settings. For completeness, we also demonstrate the complementarity of our model to existing domain adaptation methods. The code is available at https://github.com/huanghoujing/EANet.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Action Machine: Rethinking Action Recognition in Trimmed Videos

Existing methods in video action recognition mostly do not distinguish human body from the environment and easily overfit the scenes and objects. In this work, we present a conceptually simple, general and high-performance framework for action recognition in trimmed videos, aiming at person-centric modeling. The method, called Action Machine, takes as inputs the videos cropped by person bounding boxes. It extends the Inflated 3D ConvNet (I3D) by adding a branch for human pose estimation and a 2D CNN for pose-based action recognition, being fast to train and test. Action Machine can benefit from the multi-task training of action recognition and pose estimation, the fusion of predictions from RGB images and poses. On NTU RGB-D, Action Machine achieves the state-of-the-art performance with top-1 accuracies of 97.2% and 94.3% on cross-view and cross-subject respectively. Action Machine also achieves competitive performance on another three smaller action recognition datasets: Northwestern UCLA Multiview Action3D, MSR Daily Activity3D and UTD-MHAD. Code will be made available.

cs.CV↗